y-signs and lust;
curtains of pink silk fluffy troubling the skin
rooms all prinkly with chandeliers,
bed cream-color with pink silk tassles
creased by the slender press of thighs.
Her eyebrows are black
her lips rubbed scarlet
breasts firm as peaches
gold curls gold against her cheeks.
She dead
all of her dead way over there in Paris.

O golden Aphrodite.

The eye of the man from Weehawken slants
away from the eye of the man from Sioux City.
They stare at the unquiet gold dripping sky-signs.

PHASES OF THE MOON

I

Again they are plowing the field by the river;
in the air exultant a smell of wild garlic
crushed out by the shining steel in the furrow
that opens softly behind the heavy-paced horses,
dark moist noisy with fluttering of sparrows;
and their chirping and the clink of the harness
chimes like bells;
and the plowman walks at one side
with sliding steps, his body thrown back from the waist.
O the sudden sideways lift of his back and his arms
as he swings the plow from the furrow.

And behind the river sheening blue
and the white beach and the sails of schooners,
and hoarsely laughing the black crows
wheel and glint. Ha! Haha!

Other springs you answered their laughing
and shouted at them across the fallow lands
that smelt of wild garlic and pinewoods and earth.

This year the crows flap cawing overhead Ha! Haha!
and the plow-harness clinks
and the pines echo the moaning shore.

No one laughs back at the laughing crows.
No one shouts from the edge of the new-plowed field.

_Sandy Point_

II

The full moon soars above the misty street
filling the air with a shimmer of silver.
Roofs and chimney-pots cut silhouettes
of dark against the milk-washed sky!
O moon fast waning!

Seems only a night ago you hung
a shallow cup of topaz-colored glass
that tilted towards my feverish dry lips
brimful of promise in the flaming west:
O moon fast waning!

And each night fuller and colder, moon,
the silver has welled up within you; still I
I have not drunk, only the salt tide
of parching desires has welled up within me:
only you have attained, waning moon.

The moon soars white above the stony street,
wan with fulfilment. O will the ti